


Technical Difficulties

by Lady_Lola



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Gay Sex, M/M, Parent Joe, Principal Nicky, Romance, very little plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:13:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28193007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Lola/pseuds/Lady_Lola
Summary: Yusuf al Kaysani is the father of Farah, and the bane of his existence is his daughter’s school’s principal, Nicolò di Genova.Nicky is a lonely man who just needs a drink after another stressful day at work.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 10
Kudos: 41
Collections: The Old Guard Gift Exchange 2020





	Technical Difficulties

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AndreaLyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/gifts).



> Hello!  
> This fic is part of the "The Old Guard Gift Exchange", and is my personal gift to the incredibly talented AndreaLyn (go read their stories, they're amazing!)  
> I would like the people who worked really hard to coordinate this event, and moreover, I'd like to thank from the bottom of my heart the kind, generous, and very helpful Kaerith, who betaed this story and encouraged me writing it in the first place (once again, go check her fantastic stories, too!)  
> Please keep in mind that English is not my first language (I'm Italian just like Nicky/Luca, despite not from Genoa), so if you find some mistakes/inconsistencies, please point them out in the comments and I will try to correct them asap!  
> Enjoy :)

Despite what his daughter, his sister, some friends and also some people from the Parents Council thought, Joe didn’t actually hate Principal Di Genova.  
Sure, the man was cold, detached, impatient, and prone to sound snobbish during conference calls and Skype principal-parents meetings, but Joe did not hate him.  
Hate was an emotion he tried really hard not to feel, and, after getting over his turbulent youth and growing into the kind, loving single parent he was now, the rare occasions in which he felt something similar to hate rise up in his chest were directed at homophobes and racists.  
Mr. Di Genova didn’t sound like any of the two things, so he didn’t hate him. However, he grated on his nerves, and many times their calls ended with Joe saluting the principal very drily with irritation in his voice or almost slammed the phone in his face.

“Seriously, who the hell organises Skype parents-school meetings every Friday at 8pm, and then never even shows his face due to ‘technical difficulties’?” Joe raged during his weekly phone call to his sister Noor.   
“An a-hole” Noor sing-songed, rolling her eyes at her brother’s usual antics. It was at least the fourth time she had heard these exact words.  
“That’s right!” Joe answered, his rage fading into laughter at his sister’s teasing.   
“I have to admit it isn’t the most usual timing to plan a meeting, and also that he isn’t the most welcoming or the warmest person in the world, but he has an outstanding curriculum, and the students seem to love him.” Noor added. Noor too had children that went to the same school, and everyday both Joe and her listened to their kids gushing compliments and praises on Principal Di Genova.  
“Well, it looks like all the positive sentiments he can muster go to the kids, and us parents are left with the shortest of straws” Joe pondered.  
The thing is, he had been very close to Mrs. Neadle, his daughter’s school’s former principal, and when she had retired he had had a difficult time accepting it. More so if he thought about her harsh, severe substitute.  
“Isn’t it how it is supposed to be, though?” Noor bantered, “or would you prefer an ass-kisser who can’t stand teenagers? Do you remember how that went with Merrick?”   
They both shuddered, thinking about the thankfully short period in which Steven Merrick, aka Insufferable Bootlicker, managed to get his hands on the school.  
“Allah forbid, I could never forget it if I lived a thousand years!” Joe replied. “Farah had come home crying almost every day those months! Seeing her like that made my heart shatter in fragments and my blood boil in rage!”  
“So, we all agree to be more patient and helpful towards Mr. Di Genova, don’t we, Yusuf?” Noor concluded, not-so-subtle in her jab against her brother.   
“Ok, I’ll play nice,” Joe accepted, though he wasn’t quite convinced. He wasn’t trying to be difficult, he just couldn’t relate to a man whom he had never seen in person or at least on video and whose words were always so calculated and detached.  
Joe was an artist, born and raised drawing, painting and writing poetry, and words had always flown freely through his mouth and fingers; he simply didn’t get other people’s struggle with expressing themselves.

After talking to his sister, he noticed that his clock had just struck 9.30pm.  
9.30 pm on a nice, slightly chilled Friday evening. His daughter was having a sleepover at a friend’s house, and that meant she wouldn’t get home until late in the morning. It was the best night to go out and look for someone to “dance the horizontal tango” (as his other sister Mariam used to say while wiggling her eyebrows) with.  
He took a quick shower, but not quick enough he had to forego a particularly thorough cleaning of some parts of his body he really hoped he could put to good use.  
Joe went back to his bedroom, carefully sorting through his closet to find a black t-shirt, a light cashmere sweater and that tight pair of jeans even Andy said made his butt look good.   
He topped all of that with his black leather jacket, checked he still had some cash in the wallet, and headed out in the night.  
\- - - - 

Nicolò Di Genova groaned, passing his hands over his tired, drawn face.  
The Skype meetings with the Parents Council were always the lowest point of his working week.   
He had been forced to schedule them on Friday evenings, despite knowing that people usually considered Friday evenings as the beginning of well-earned weekends and didn’t want to spend hours going through school policies and programs and activities scheduling. That was why he always talked in a clipped, no-bullshit tone, cutting out all useless formalities and details just to get quickly to the point and end their miseries as soon as possible.  
He didn’t even look at the screen during meetings, too busy going through papers, calendars, documents, and moreover he knew that his webcam was broken and the people on Skype couldn’t see him, so he didn’t care about facing the screen at all.

Since he was tired, grumpy, and in dire need of a time-out, he decided that a night out would only do him good.  
Nicky was not a bar person, he had never been even in his youth.   
Bar people usually were fun, easygoing, and interested in nothing more than some laughs, some drinks and a quick roll in the hay with a suitable body.  
Nicky, well, he was simply not wired that way. Always too shy, too quiet and yet too direct the few times he spoke, bars were not the ideal hunting ground for Nicolò Di Genova.   
After a few unsatisfactory one-night stands and an attempt at relationship that had failed horrendously (Keane had been cheating on him from day 1, and when Nicky had caught him fucking another man when he had been supposed to be bedridden with flu, he had also had the nerve to blame Nicky and his “absolutely appalling skills under the sheets”), Nicky had just given up on the idea of finding someone to spend his life with and just dug out of his self-made exile three or four times a year to fuck some pent-up frustration out of his system.  
And that’s exactly what was gonna happen that Friday night, too.

He went down to “The Guard”, the LGBT+ bar closest to his house and farthest from his school district and most of his students’ neighborhoods. It wasn’t like the school’s Board of Directors and Parents Council would have been against him for being gay per se (it was a private school but not a Catholic one), it was just that some things were better left unsaid and unaddressed. “Don’t ask don’t tell” might have been canceled in the United States’ military, but in some ways private schools’ policies were even stricter than the Army.  
He was nursing his beer and chatting idly with the bartender, a shaggy but good-looking man going by the name of Booker, when a man sat on the stool next to his.   
The man greeted Booker warmly, asking about his friend’s life effortlessly in French, which earned the first honest and open smile Nicky had seen on the bartender’s face as he answered; after that, Nicky abandoned any pretense at discretion and openly devoted his attention to the man next to him.

And Good Lord, what a man he was. Probably slightly taller than him, with a thick bush of black, soft-looking and carefully styled curls, warm dark eyes and a full beard which called to him to slide his fingers through.  
He also had a nice voice, and a lovely, crystalline laugh that had enthralled him so much that he didn’t realise the men had stopped talking to each other and had been looking at him for quite a few moments.

“Nicky, have you met Joe?” Booker asked him, trying to hide a smirk, but failing miserably.  
Nicky snapped out of his reverie then, embarrassed to the core, slapped too much cash on the counter, and ran out of the bar. He stopped then, leaning his back on the dirty wall right to the door, and covered his face with his hands.  
‘Dio Santo, Nicolò, che figura di merda! Stupido coglione, stupido, stupido, stupido…’ (1) 

That’s how the man found him, muttering insults to himself outside the bar, and joined him.  
“Hey, are you alright?” he asked Nicky; “You look like somebody died...”  
At that, Nicky laughed bitterly. “Only the last shards of my self-esteem I suppose…”   
He closed his eyes, letting his head fall backwards to the wall, and spoke softly.  
“I would like to apologise for staring at you like that, earlier in the bar… It’s just that, well, you and Booker were speaking French, and he laughed, and I’ve been coming to The Guard for months and I’ve never heard Booker laugh, and I’m sure you know the effect you can have on men and...”   
Nicky was definitely rambling by then, and Joe found it incredibly endearing.   
“Yeah, well, me and Booker go way back; he’s always been a grumpy bastard, but I find that almost all French are grumpy bastards, and after having spent few years in Paris I’m immune to it. We moved here at the same time, you know? After his divorce and mine… well, I mean we’ve been friends for years now, but I have to admit you’re right, I’m the only person who makes him laugh so much,” Joe said, and Nicky had not missed the pang of sadness in his eyes as he vaguely hinted at the reason why he had left Paris with the barman.  
“Well, I still apologise. I shouldn’t have stared at you, it was very rude of me, and definitely wrong,” Nicky stammered.  
“I don’t mind, actually,” Joe replied, his voice getting low and seductive; “If I didn’t want to be stared at by a hot man with the most incredible eyes I wouldn’t go to gay-friendly bars wearing the tightest pants I own on Friday nights.”  
Joe smiled seductively and continued: “Tell me, Nicky, do you have to be somewhere else tonight? I couldn’t help but notice that you left your drink unfinished, and that’s a shame. We could, if you’re amenable, go back to my place and have another, or just relax a bit.” 

Joe got very close to Nicky and started caressing his jaw lightly with his thumb, moving it closer to his chin and mouth with every caress.   
Nicky looked at him like a deer in the traffic lights, because he really couldn’t believe a man like Joe could want someone like him. At the same time, he wanted to say yes more than he had ever wanted anything else in his whole life, so he pushed himself away from the wall, placed a hand on Joe’s hip, and answered that he had had nowhere else to go and that he would love to.  
Joe grinned like the Cheshire cat at that, and used the hand that had been still caressing Nicky’s face to bring his mouth to his in a passionate kiss.   
Nicky followed him very, very willingly.

The short walk to Joe’s place, a nice two-storied house with a well kept lawn, was quite a blur.

As soon as they entered the door, Joe led Nicky up the stairs, kissing him as his own life had depended on it, and at the same time he discarded his jacket and shoes on the way to the bedroom.  
Nicky’s head was spinning, probably due to the lack of oxygen, but he really did not mind. He was too busy half undressing himself, half touching Joe everywhere he was able to reach, and he didn’t even notice the road to Joe’s bedroom had ended until his knees caught the edge of the bed and he fell onto it with the same grace of a falling tree.  
Joe was immediately on him, ordering him to take his cardigan and shirt off while he quickly stripped him of his socks and trousers. Then, with Nicky sat on his bed in just his black, tented boxers, Joe stepped away and undressed himself until he stood completely naked in front of the other man.

Nicky wasn’t able to get his eyes off of Joe; he swallowed thickly, pupils completely blown in lust and breathing heavily. 

“Look at you,” Joe said breathlessly. He smiled at Nicky, his eyes tracing his features. “Seeing you like this, so open and wanting… makes me wanna fill my sketchbook with sketches of your face and body. Though I don’t think I could ever get the colour of your beautiful eyes right. I know we came for an entirely different purpose, but the depth of your eyes and the shape of your lips makes my hands itch to immortalize how you look in this moment.”

“Oh please Joe, I’ll let you paint me however you want later if you just touch me now,” Nicky said roughly, falling back on the bed and pulling Joe down with him.

Once again Joe smiled and murmured “Oh, ya amar, you say the most splendid things, and I can’t help but want to give you everything you desire,” then freed him from his underwear.   
Nicky groaned feeling the fabric stretching over his hard cock, and before he was able to even take a steadying breath, Joe knelt on the floor between his legs and swallowed him whole.  
Nicky’s upper body instinctively tensed to bolt up, but Joe placed one of his strong hands on his stomach to stop him while the other caressed his thigh and his mouth was working its magic on his cock.  
Joe loved giving head, loved feeling in control of his partner’s pleasure, deciding the speed, the depth, and the twists of his “work”. He felt Nicky getting worked up, his breathing was getting more and more labored by the minute; his hands stopped carding languidly through his curls and began to clutch at his head to keep it in place.  
When a particularly deep suck made Nicky pant hard, Joe decided it was time to stop before the show ended too soon. He moved his mouth away from Nicky’s dick, kissing his way up to his navel and then his abs.  
Nicky smiled at him, his cream-coloured skin shiny with perspiration, then reached for his shoulders and encouraged Joe to lay onto him and kiss him on the mouth.   
As their tongues slid against each other, Joe grabbed the other man’s thighs and moved him to the center of the bed. Nicky didn’t waste any time: he opened his legs to let the dark-haired man lie between them, and then placed his hands on his back, fingers digging into the soft skin till they met the hard muscles underneath.

Joe broke away from him for a moment, panting and drunk with passion.  
“Just give me a second, habibi, we need supplies to make it work,” Joe declared, sliding slightly off Nicky and searching for a few seconds in the night stand drawer for a condom and lubricant; when he found them, he placed them on the bed next to his lover and they got back to kissing and frotting.  
After a few more minutes of heated foreplay, Joe raised his head and asked Nicky: “So, how would you like to continue? Do you have a preference? I’m versatile, but at the moment I’d love to...”  
His sentence was cut out abruptly when Nicky almost yelled “For the love of God, Joe, get in me!” and drew Joe’s mouth to his throat, desperate to have him bite and mark his skin.  
Joe laughed against his shoulder, then granted his wish by leaving a large hickey at the base of his neck; he reached for the lube and applied a generous quantity of it on his fingers, then he brought them to Nicky’s hole and started slowly pressing on it.   
His eyes never left Nicky’s face, carefully looking for any kind of discomfort, and when he found none, he pushed his index finger inside his lover. Nicky threw his head back when Joe found his prostate, and panting he begged Joe to give him more.  
“As you wish” Joe replied, then withdrew his finger to the first knuckle, and then pushed it in again adding the middle finger as well.   
After a few minutes, Nicky couldn’t wait anymore.  
“Joe, Joe I’m ready, I want it, I-ah, ah aaaah- want you!” he uttered.   
If he had been just a little bit more coherent, he would surely have been shocked and even ashamed about the explicit way he was begging his partner to give him pleasure.  
Nicky was never that way, he was usually shier and way less vocal, but Joe was beautiful and self-assured and was making him see stars, so he decided he didn’t actually care about his sudden debauchery.  
Joe had rejoiced at the opportunity to have a moment to collect himself before moving on; he had not expected the flustered, embarrassed man he had picked up at the bar to be so arousing and free in his pleasure. It was a nice surprise, and while he couldn’t wait to go on, he had been getting a bit too excited already during the blowjob and the frotting, and having to prepare Nicky had been a Godsend for cooling him down a bit.  
Now, however, it was time to get the main act going.  
Joe withdrew his fingers carefully, leaving Nicky whining and immediately missing being full of them.  
He rolled the condom on his shaft carefully, then grabbed a pillow and placed it under Nicky’s hips to raise them a bit. He cast another look at the beautiful, flustered man under him, and bent down to kiss him passionately once more. 

“Are you ready, hayati?” he murmured, enjoying how his lover chased his with his lips.   
“As I’ve never been before,” the other man replied, then raised his legs to prepare himself and locked his eyes with his.

Joe placed his hands on Nicky’s hips, lined up his cock to the pink hole in front of him, then slowly but steadily pushed himself inside his partner’s welcoming body.  
He moved carefully, he didn’t want to risk injuring Nicky, but Nicky was not having it, because as soon as he felt Joe breaching him, he hooked his legs around his body and pushed back.   
The move pulled a guttural moan out of Joe’s lips, as he slid all the way into Nicky. They both stopped for a moment, panting loudly, before Joe regained a bit of his composure and started fucking Nicky in earnest.  
Every single one of Joe’s pushes into him made Nicky die and go (ironically) straight to Heaven, and he was barely coherent enough to be able to tear one of his hands away from Joe’s toned ass and grab his cock, and then started jerking off in tempo with the snap of his lover’s hips.  
On his part, Joe was grabbing Nicky’s thighs, palming and caressing them, but also using them as leverage to maintain his frenzied rhythm.  
“Oh Joe, Joe Dio mio! Che cosa mi stai facendo?” (2) Nicky blurted, so far gone in his passion that he hadn’t realised he had switched to italian. “Mi stai rovinando, sei la cosa migliore che mi sia mai capitata!” (3)  
Joe, in other moments when his mind was focused and fully alert, could have probably understood what Nicky was saying (he had studied Medieval Art in Italy for six months, he was quite familiar with the language), but at that moment he wouldn’t have been able to understand even the sweet Tunisian dialect spoken by his grandmother, the person he had loved most in his life (before having his daughter).  
“So close, Nicky, so close...” he panted; Nicky felt his climax nearing, so moved the hand he wasn’t touching himself with to the back of Joe’s head and brought him down for a searing kiss, and then panted harshly in his mouth as he reached a mind-breaking orgasm. 

The kiss, the warmth of Nicky’s breath on his face, the wetness of his semen splashing between their bodies made Joe reach his own climax and fall over, and he came in the crushing tightness of Nicky’s heated body.  
He crashed into him, his spent body unable to keep him up one second more; he exited from his lover carefully, discarding the condom while Nicky blindly reached for a piece of cloth (which turned out to be his undershirt) to hastily clean them both before sleep caught them.

After a few hours spent alternating bouts of sleep and brief moments in which they couldn’t get their hands, mouths or bodies away from each other, the sunrise found them once again lost in passion.  
Nicky collapsed on Joe’s chest, breathing heavily; it couldn't be avoided, since he had been riding his hard cock for a good part of the last hour and, when he hadn't, they still had been involved in many other kinds of loving touches and kisses.  
He smiled on the other's man skin, mouthing and sucking it until he elicited a laugh that shook both their bodies.

"You should stop, before I decide to flip us and give it another go,” the bearded man teased, his golden skin glistering and slick with sweat.  
"Ready when you are" Nicky answered, arching a well-defined eyebrow in a flirty expression, mere seconds before bursting in laughter and adding, "Please don't, I'm not sure I could survive another go.”

Every single one of his muscles was aching and sore, the pleasant kind of ache he usually felt after his 15 kilometres Sunday morning run.  
He disentangled and rolled on the bed next to Joe, while his lover got up to dispose of the condom and got back to bed carrying a warm wet towel for him.

"Thank you" he said, hastily cleaning up and wincing when the towel scratched his sensitized hole.  
He got up and started dressing, and the other man did the same.

When they were ready, they both walked to the front door.  
Joe opened the door, then spoke.  
"So…”, and stopped, looking for words that would convey his feelings without making Nicky think he was some sort of weirdo and made him run to the hills. “This night has been definitely one of the best I’ve had, and I would love to see you again.”  
“Yeah, me too”, Nicky answered earnestly, then placed his hand on the back of Joe’s head and drew him close, kissing him deeply.  
“We could go on a date next Friday, if you want?”, Joe asked him, blaming the lack of words to the very short sleep he had had during the night (not to mention getting lost in those water green eyes).  
“I’d love to. I have a work thing until 9pm, but after that we can meet for dinner or drinks”, Nicky agreed.  
“Yeah. I have a thing until 9, too. A Skype meeting with my daughter’s school’s Parents Council and the school’s principal… Well, I say meeting, but that infuriating man never actually showed his face! ‘Technical difficulties’ he claims, but in my opinion he just doesn’t want to be bothered”, Joe added laughing. “Sorry, I’m digressing...”

He wanted to add more, but when he looked at Nicky’s face he stopped in his tracks.  
It was like a bucket of ice-cold had been dumped on Nicky’s head, and he was staring at him in full panic.

“Does...”, Nicky stammered, then stopped and tried to draw a steadying breath. “Does your daughter attend the ‘Freeman Preparatory School’?”  
Joe was surprised. “How do you know that?”

Nicky closed his eyes.   
Here it was, his biggest nightmare come true. He had just fucked one of his students’ parent.

When he found the courage to speak, his voice sounded defeated, dejected.  
“There are, indeed, technical difficulties, I’m not a liar. My computer’s webcam died a few months ago, and despite what many people think, a principal’s wage doesn’t allow to splurge on things other than a mortgage, formal clothes, and the occasional take out when I work into late hours”, Nicky admitted, looking anywhere but Joe’s face.  
Joe’s eyes widened as he realised that his Nicky, the seemingly shy but extremely passionate man he had spent the night with, in reality was Nicolò Di Genova.

“Could you tell me your name?” Nicky asked quietly. “I think it would only be fair, since you already know all there is to know about me.”  
Joe looked at him for a moment, taking in the coy attitude of the man standing on his porch, so different from the coldness he seemed to emanate working.  
“My name’s Yusuf Al Kaysani, but everyone calls me Joe here”, he replied.  
“Aw yes, Farah’s father. I can see it now, you have the same kind eyes”, Nicky said with a little smile that could do very little to ease the worry marking his forehead. “Although that kindness is not directed at me or how I do my job. I know I can be harsh, but I really care about my students, and sometimes their parents are their worst enemies.”  
“Listen Nicky”, Joe started, “you and I have obviously started on the wrong foot. I apologise for my hasty judgment on you, I admit that I can be very difficult to deal with when my daughter’s life is involved. I really mean what I’ve said before. I want to date you. I feel there’s a lot about you that’s worth knowing, and I hope you’ll see past my prejudices and give us a chance.”   
Joe had put his hands on Nicky’s face, making him look up and hopefully see the honesty in his eyes.  
“I… have to think about it, Joe”, Nicky stammered. “You being the father of one of my students complicate things, especially if we began a relationship and then it became public. I worked so hard to get this job, and while teachers-parents relationships are not prohibited, they’re still frowned upon.”  
“I don’t know what the future holds for me or for you, Nicky”, Joe breathed after few moments of silence. “I only know that, after divorcing Farah’s mother, I have been alone. I’ve had many nights like the one we spent together, but none of them left me so eager to try and start a relationship with the person who had just got out of my bed. I feel you’re special, Nicolò, and I don’t want to give this opportunity up.”  
“I’ve never felt like this before either”, Nicky admitted sadly. “I have spent years studying, then immediately moved on to starting my career. My love life has been, ehm, lacking. I miss having a partner. I’d love to see where this... thing between us could go.”  
“We’ll take it slow”, Joe bid, “just… let’s try Nicky. Let’s just try, together.”  
“Together” Nicolò smiled.

Joe kissed him passionately, making him feel more confident of his decision.

“Just promise me one thing, ya amar” Joe teased.  
“What?” Nicky sighed.  
“Promise me you’ll reschedule those awful Skype meetings!”

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. “Good God, Nicolò, what a way to look like a dick! You stupid moron, stupid, stupid, stupid…”  
> 2\. “Oh Joe, what are you doing to me?”  
> 3\. “You’re ruining me, you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me!”


End file.
